Communication Was on the Radio This Weekend

I’m a bit of a science geek. The hobby rarely results in anything directly related to my area of interest, but this weekend the Science Friday podcast dedicated 45 minutes to a panel discussion on the task of communicating science. The show was a goldmine of practical examples of the concepts I try to teach in first-year composition (FYC). Some examples: what constitutes noise in the rhetorical situation; audience-centered approach versus message-centered approach; the importance of balancing concepts, context, and issues; the barriers to entry for many academic/professional communities; source evaluation; breaking down a complex message into its component parts; and my favorite, most academic and professional communities are meritocracies not democracies.

I hope some of my students will take the time to listen to the panel discussion. It is an interesting discussion on communication, science, and the intersection of the scientific community and the public sphere.

The show was of particular interest to me because of the paper I am working on.

The impetus for one of my paper’s main points is this: FYC occupies a particularly awkward moment in the development of many student writers - before they have dug into the college-level discourse of any specific discipline.

This awkward moment presents an obstacle that we must contend with in FYC. Our goal is to give students the skills they will need to contribute effectively to the communities they eventually join, but we must accomplish this before we know exactly what those communities are going to be.

Let me name just a few of the career paths my undergraduate students have expressed an interest in: manufacturing, consulting, finance, fashion, marketing, automobiles, NGOs, government work, entrepreneurship, and the list goes on. As the students advance into upper-division courses related to their individual interests, they will be expected to learn how increasingly-specialized academics communicate about those industries. Then most of the students will step out into the industries and engage in communication processes unique to each community. On top of that, within those industries there are so many different roles. During a recent seminar on communication, members of the MBA class were quick to point out that even within the same company, different departments use vastly different methods of communication.

So the skill set our students obtain in FYC needs to be a combination of

A) the basic tools of written communication and

B) the analytical skills required to evaluate and meet the needs of a discourse community.

Science Friday’s discussion puts a lot of that into a practical context by flipping the challenge on its head. The discussion participants talk about how the science community is struggling to adjust to the expectations of an outside audience. My hope is that students with a strong understanding of the how discourse communities function can go out into the real world and address the issues that beset both outsiders and insiders of any community.

As a final note, I believe it is easy to show the parallel between the scientific community’s issues and the business community. I’ll offer the most obvious example before signing off:

Climate Change: The scientific community has had tremendous difficulty relating complex ideas that involve uncertainty, probability, and complex computations to a public that is hungry for easy-to-digest practical applications. This has resulted in tremendous confusion about how to use information to make policy decisions.

Derivatives: The finance community has had tremendous difficulty relating complex ideas that involve uncertainty, probability, and complex computations to a public that is hungry for easy-to-digest practical applications. This has resulted in tremendous confusion about how to use information to make policy decisions.

Sorry about the new security

Hey all (three of my readers),
I didn't ever want to add word verification for comments. I didn't want to cut anonymous comments. But the blog spammers have found me, and their bot comments are popping up all over.

It's annoying, I know, but it could be worse.

Great Material From Acephalous

My friend and coworker Eric sent this my way. As the post states, it is aimed a very specific audience, but speaks very directly to my work. Enjoy.

Race in Hungary

Just before the holidays Dora and I were eating dinner when we heard a man yelling down in the street. I went to open the window. We could then hear the clearly drunk man chanting the Hungarian equivalent of "Jew go home."

How can you respond to that - especially when you live in the 7th District, the traditionally Jewish district of Budapest?

I've used this space in the past to vent about Hungary's troubled relationship with the minority communities in its borders. It's a topic that gets me riled for two reasons:
1) The worst of examples are violent and motivated by little more than demagoguery.
2) As an outsider, more often than not my views on the issue are dismissed out of hand.

That's a frustrating place to be when you would like to seek a deeper understanding of a problem - perhaps even engage in a constructive effort to improve things.

That frustration is very much related to the paper I'm working on. Much of the reading I've been doing for this project is about young people who do not fit the profile of the typical college student. The effort to bring their views into the academic community seems like a noble cause, but like so many noble causes, it's complicated. In order to interact with an established community, a person must learn and accept the methods the community uses to interact: who is considered an authority, what gives a person the right to challenge an idea/argument, what beliefs are held as truths. These kinds of interactions are dictated by culture and values. So if you want to bring an outsider in, you sometimes have to challenge the person's culture and values. Like I said, it can get complicated.

I hadn't thought of myself as the outsider in such a situation until last week. Dora's extended family got together to celebrate a collection of birthdays and an anniversary. At dinner I sat next to Mate (say "Ma-tey"). He's a law student. He's very smart and very opinionated. He and I don't see eye-to-eye on every issue, and that's okay. But I always try to challenge his take on the Roma (Gypsy) population. He believes that many of Hungary's problems stem from the Roma. Last week I spent at least fifteen minutes listening to Mate explain how the Roma are destroying his country.

I have very little patience for this kind of talk. I believe Hungarians who hold Mate's view are trying to shift the responsibility for the nation's many serious problems to a minority population - a population that has very little political or financial power. The issues that have hampered Hungary's growth are rampant corruption, the public acceptance of tax fraud, and a bloated bureaucratic government that provides very little when you consider people are supposed to pay 50% of their income in taxes. It is absurd to blame these kinds of problems on a group that composes no more than 10% of the population (and that figure is considered a gross overestimate by many).

I've tried to confront Mate's view directly. I've tried to question Mate's assumptions. I've tried acting stupid and forcing him to explain what it is that the Roma have done to make his life so difficult (his life is not very difficult btw). Whenever I get anywhere close to making a point, my views are dismissed. Since I am not Hungarian, I cannot understand how serious the problem is. So my questions and arguments are moot.

My beliefs keep me at arms length from this debate, but it's frustrating because I live here. I am a part of the community - but not really.

Strange as this may sound, I'm thankful for the experience. As a white heterosexual male with a stable family background, it is difficult for me to understand what it means to be a member of a community who lacks certain rights or abilities. This is a rather minor example of that, but it provides some insight.

I like this take on the Sen. Reid thing

Frank James' take on the gaffe by Senator Reid speaks to a lot of my frustrations with manufactured controversies.

In it, James gets at how people are willing to twist the facts in a debate. Often participants get so worked up about an issue that they grab at anything resembling evidence in their support. In such haste, however, the issue often get lost and people end up simply shouting insults at each other.

I'm not in the States to see how intense this "issue" is getting, but I was surprised to hear people compare Reid's comment to Lott's 2002 comments supporting the breakaway segregationist party of 1948. That seems to be a lopsided analogy at best...
A tasteless and politically incorrect description of Obama
versus
A 2002 statement of support for a party with this in their platform: "We stand for the segregation of the races and the racial integrity of each race."

It may not be apples and oranges, but one is certainly more rotten than the other. Don't you think?

What is Fair Play?

This article was in the Washington Post today.

GOP Senators tried to filibuster a military funding bill. If the filibuster had succeeded, Democrats would likely have to drop health care reform and find an alternative to funding the troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. The filibuster did not succeed, but only 3 of 36 Republicans voted to end the filibuster (and only after all 60 Dems had already voted 'aye').

I recognize that right now the GOP's number one priority is the defeat of the Dem's health care reform bill. Nevertheless, what does it mean when politicians are willing to betray one of their core values while in pursuit of a goal?

How is a soldier supposed to view of this event? "The GOP didn't really want to withhold support from the military; they were just using our troops as political capital."

Someone who is willing to concede "core values" in order to win the day does not have real core values. Maybe it sounds naive to hope politicians are guided by certain principles, but they're the ones claiming to have them in the first place.

Poorly Rationed Reasoning

So my new goal here at Hogs is to play around with some of the big arguments of the day. On Monday I dove into the troubles that erupted around the climate change debate after the computers were hacked at CRU. The most interesting comment for me was Karmavore's distinction between "Climate Change Skeptics" & "Climate Change Disbelievers." The difference is important, and it will affect the way I engage in that discussion in the future.

I hope that kind of thing will happen more often here. I want to look at the divisive issues that are too often cast in black and white and then seek out the gray areas.

The hot button issue for today is health care, more specifically last week's ruckus around the word rationing. The issue came into sharp focus after the results of a study on mammography were released by the Preventive Services Task Force. The study recommends that women do not need to start regular screenings for breast cancer until the age of 50. The previous recommendation had been to start screenings at 40.

Patients can ignore the study and get screened in their 40s anyway. However, the people signing the check for those screenings may object, and since most people do not sign the check for their own health care, there is a conflict. People are nervous that the check signers might listen to the experts and certain tests won't get paid for.

Of course that nervousness spilled over into the health care reform debate.

Last week the WSJ's opinion page suggested a lot of things that might happen if the government tried to reduce health care spending. The piece critiques how the government plans to decide what medical procedures to pay for? The idea is to put experts in place, experts like the ones who put out the study on mammography.

With that study out, suddenly we have a stand-in for "the bureaucrat that will get between you and your doctor." And that bureaucrat is advising us to reduce breast cancer screenings. I understand the uproar. Women have been told that regular screenings can save their lives. Now some acronym is telling them to forget about that. It is a powerful reminder of the fact that personal heath care decisions are not always up to the individual. And with the reform bill ready for debate next week, powerful reminders like that are explosive.

My concern is that such explosive material can be misused. Private insurers are also likely to take note of the mammogram study. No matter the insurance scheme, there is a limited amount of money in a pool, and someone needs to decide how to best spend it.

Peter Singer's July piece in the NYT Magazine asks readers to do the following: think about the spending limits you would put on another person's medical treatment if experts claimed that the treatment was not effective in most cases. Singer asks for a number. It's a tough call.

This is the decision any insurer must make. The pro-reform people have cast the private insurers as heartless for refusing service, but the measures up for debate in Congress will put similar decisions in the hands of government appointees.

And that is the heart of the matter: Who do you want making those decisions about rationing?

I like the government appointed panel of experts, because we can demand transparency. The debate over the mammogram study is an example of how a government panel's findings are open to the public and up for debate.

What do you think?

Why the CRU Leak Isn't the Biggest of Deals

I can't speak to the details around the leak at CRU, as the data is out of context. But at first blush it does look like the scientists at that facility are doing some less-than-ethical work. And less-than-ethical is not a euphemism here. It's an accusation. Data needs to inform the theory, not vice versa. When this all get sorted out, if the science was bad, then the results from that lab are tainted.

But CRU isn't the only body of scientists looking into climate change. Here's an article that cites data from 2 peer review journals. The data does not come from CRU, nor is it interpreted by the people at CRU. The results are not pretty: Even if we could cut greenhouse gases by tomorrow, the ocean levels look like they will rise a meter by 2100. If I have grandchildren, they will see coast lines and island nations disappear.

The movement to slow our contribution to climate change isn't going to stop this. According to most experts, however, we might be able to mitigate the damages.

So here's my question for skeptics of anthropomorphic climate change: Why/how would scientists from a variety of fields, policy makers, and business leaders collaborate to execute a hoax on a global scale?

The groups involved are not like-minded. What could possibly motivate them to work together to forward a false cause?

Job security? The scientists at UT studying "nearly seven years of data on ocean-icesheet interaction... collected by the twin GRACE satellites" do not need global warming to ply their trade. They have tremendous analytical and technical skills. They'll find work.

Political motives? Have you ever met a research scientist? Seen one on TV? Probably not. They are not political creatures.

Greed? Well, Gore is set to make a lot of money if the energy sector goes green. If his motive was just money, however, why not buy a drilling platform? That would produce faster returns that are more secure?

Stupidity? Are we to believe that a select few have convinced top scientists, world leaders, and savvy business people to believe in something that is baseless? Who are these evil geniuses, where is their secret underground base, and why are they doing this?

The CC skeptics are claiming that disparate groups of well trained specialists have either met in secret to dupe the world OR that they have themselves been duped by a group with a desire to transition the planet to clean energy for unspecified reasons.

The moon landing conspiracy theory looks rational by comparison. You'll have to excuse me for siding with the diverse group of experts who have found something to agree on despite it's challenging implications. While the other side's accusations of conspiracy allow me to comfortably continue my life unchanged, the accusations are asking me to believe in something much more unrealistic than greenhouse gases.